Friday, 21 January 2011

Smoking in pubs: what I’d forgotten

The place was actually open and trading for a start. It wasn’t one of the 7,000-odd that have closed since 1 July 2007.
It was busy, lively and convivial. There was good crack on the vault side.
There were some genuine characters in the place.
There were dogs. Proper country dogs. That belonged to the smokers.
There wasn’t an offputting aroma of sweat, flatulence, urine, cooking fat and cleaning fluid.
Half the customers weren’t forced to cower outside in the rain and wind like pariahs.
There weren’t any humourless middle-class bigots sitting in the middle of an empty room proclaiming how nice it was now there was no smoke – and no smokers – in the pub.
Nobody moaned about how supermarkets were killing pubs.
Oh, it was terrible. I’d gladly have it back tomorrow.

(prompted by this from someone who you might have thought would know better)

Anyone would think there was once a law making it compulsory for pubs to permit smoking. Odd that the market takes care of every other preference but, with smoking, nobody was prepared to get rich by opening a smokefree pub- apart from the Hare and Hounds in Todmorden, which lasted a few months (must have been its location, eh). Why didn't you neurotics avoid cancer by going to it while it was open?

"There weren’t any humourless middle-class bigots sitting in the middle of an empty room proclaiming how nice it was now there was no smoke – and no smokers – in the pub."

It's worse than that. At the one pub near where I work where there are half way decent smoking facilities (IR heaters and awning), the 'humourless middle class bigots' who walk past flap their hands under their noses and say how disgusting it is that WE are polluting THEIR space.

Re: Mark's reference to people flapping their hands. I'm a non-smoker, BUT I'm not writing to repeat yet again the same arguments about the ban.

My point is this: when I was a trade union rep, our employer banned smoking from all buildings a year before the national ban. Once the ban came in, I got complaints from a small minority of non-smokers about the faint whiff of smoke you might smell for a second before entering the building, or even the fact that smokers could take a smoking break.

I told them I wasn't prepared to take these complaints forward, and besides I'd seen them chatting by the tea point or water cooler. That didn't go down well, so I told them it wasn't my job to represent their pet hates to management, but there was nothing to stop them doing so themselves. Funnily enough, none of them did: they just wanted me to fire the bullets.

I now hear the same whinge - again from a minority - about a whiff of smoke as people enter pubs. I just say, "I'm sure you can cope with it for a second or two."

Yes, there are some annoying anti-smoking bigots. In fact I went out with one for two years; I've never met anyone so anti-smoking. When I bumped into her years later in a pub, there she was puffing away.

She admitted she'd been an ex-smoker when she met me. The worst anti-smokers in my experience are often ex-smokers. They can almost evangelical and they bore me as much as I'm sure they bore smokers.

RedNev: You make a very good point about the change in attitudes since the ban.

As you say, prior to it, restrictions on smoking - brought in voluntarily - were observed and everyone got on, but the legitimising of smoker hatred that the ban introduced (it is purposely and sinisterly termed 'denormalisation') has encouraged certain anti-smokers to be haughty and superior, whilst simultaneously alienating smokers to such an extent that they naturally become aggressively defensive when confronted. It's a classic case of the state making things worse overall with unintended consequences to their actions.

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Salient quotations

"If I see one more politician who voted for the smoking ban crying crocodile tears about the state of the pub industry, I may throw up." (Chris Snowdon)

"The era of big, bossy, state interference, top-down lever pulling is coming to an end." (David Cameron, 2008)

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." (H. L. Mencken)

"The final nails have now been hammered into the coffin of the freedom to smoke in enclosed public places. This piece of legislation must be one of the most restrictive, spiteful and socially divisive imposed by any British Government. (Lord Stoddart of Swindon)

"Raising taxes on alcohol to prevent problem drinking is akin to raising the price of gasoline to prevent people from speeding." (Edward Peter Stringham)

"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." (C. S. Lewis)

"People who deal only in 'craft' beer do not care about some dirty old pub and the dirty old people who are in it and the dirty old community that it holds together." (Boozy Procrastinator)

"There's a saying that, given time, all organisations end up as if they were run by a conspiracy of their foes." (Rhys Jones)

"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming 'Wow! What a Ride!" (Hunter S. Thompson)

"No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home at Weston-super-Mare." (Kingsley Amis)

"When you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves,
For you will have lost the last of England." (Hilaire Belloc)